Use Your Words brings writers, readers, and listeners together for evenings of sharing and conversation. Each date will be hosted by a different local writer, with readings by colleagues, students, writing groups, published authors, and storytellers. Themes will include Emergence, Grief, Creaturely Stories, Lives Gone Off Script, True Tales, Memoirs, and more. The hosts will open conversations around each evening’s themes, but also talk about writing practices, writing groups, and other skills to empower the art of writing and to encourage reading.

Three nonfiction writers will read from their books in progress—tales of lives thrown wildly off-script or that never had scripts to begin with. Q&A to follow the reading.

Laura Didyk, host (Great Barrington, MA)
Amanda Giracca (Housatonic, MA)
Sarah Canney (Farmington, NH)

Laura Didyk’s writing has been published in The Sun, Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review,  Diagram, Post Road, and Paterson Literary Review, among others. She has been a resident writing fellow at Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony where she received the Rona Jaffe Foundation award. She is currently at work on a memoir.

She lives, writes, and makes art in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.